News Summary

Electric utilities need to respond quickly to power outages and provide timely, accurate updates to stakeholders and customers during major storm events. At the same time, these companies face the daunting task of gathering and managing data from an increasing number of sources. To help utilities streamline these processes, Oracle made significant updates to its Oracle Utilities Outage Analytics dashboards and ETL technology. Part of the Oracle Utilities Analytics 2.5.1 release, these enhancements enable utilities to organize and analyze incoming storm data in near real time so they can quickly identify issues, speed time to response and restoration, and improve communication with first responders, customers, and media during a storm outage.

The enhanced Oracle Utilities Outage Analytics dashboards enable utilities to harness the large amounts of data they generate during storms and major outages at a much greater scale and analyze it in near real time, helping to improve response rates and event management. ETL technology via Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle GoldenGate facilitates quick access to that information—data is refreshed within minutes, providing critical details such as outage density, customer outages color coded by square miles or regions, crews and assignments, and estimated restoration time. This improved information flow enables utilities to make better decisions in the storm room.

Oracle Utilities Analytics 2.5.1 also helps improve reliability management and associated regulatory reporting for utilities. The solution’s historical outage dashboard shows data such as service area segment performance, device type, and worst-performing assets that utilities can analyze in order to pinpoint weaknesses in the grid and inform repair and replace decisions. Additionally, the reliability dashboard helps utilities manage performance data, which can then be recalled and matched against indices such as System Average Interruption Duration Index, System Average Interruption Frequency Index, and Momentary Average Interruption Frequency Index. The reliability dashboard can also package the data in a format appropriate for regulatory reporting.

This latest version of Oracle Utilities Outage Analytics reduces the impact of analytics on the outage management system. Customer support teams and account management personnel can use Oracle Utilities Outage Analytics dashboards without having to log into and bog down the outage management application during a major storm event. The solution also enables utilities to scale a single outage management system exponentially, which benefits organizations needing to support new assets and customers due to merger and acquisition activity.

Supporting Quote

“Today’s utilities need tools to help manage complex, evolving, and often life-threatening situations in the event of an outage. The latest release of Oracle Utilities Analytics includes updates to its prebuilt historical outage and reliability dashboards that enable utilities to more effectively respond to storms, improve device management, and provide more-efficient customer operations,” said Rodger Smith, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Utilities.